Expositor's Bible: The Epistles of St. John Part 5

Now without entering into the details of Gnosticism, this may be said of its general method and purpose. It aspired at once to accept and to transform the Christian creed; to elevate its faith into a philosophy, a _knowledge_--and then to make this knowledge cashier and supersede faith, love, holiness, redemption itself.

This system was strangely eclectic, and amalgamated certain elements not only of Greek and Egyptian, but of Persian and Indian Pantheistic thought. It was infected throughout with dualism and doketism. Dualism held that all good and evil in the universe proceeded from two first principles, good and evil. Matter was the power of evil whose home is in the region of darkness. Minds which started from this fundamental view could only accept the Incarnation provisionally and with reserve, and must at once proceed to explain it away. "The Word was made flesh;" but the Word of G.o.d, the True Light, could not be personally united to an actual material system called a human body, plunged in the world of matter, darkened and contaminated by its immersion. The human flesh in which Jesus appeared to be seen was fict.i.tious. Redemption was a drama with a shadow for its hero. The phantom of a redeemer was nailed to the phantom of a cross. Philosophical dualism logically became theological _doketism_. Doketism logically evaporated dogmas, sacraments, duties, redemption.[74]

It may be objected that this doketism has been a mere temporary and local aberration of the human intellect; a metaphysical curiosity, with no real roots in human nature. If so, its refutation is an obsolete piece of an obsolete controversy; and the Epistle in some of its most vital portions is a dead letter.

Now of course literal doketism is past and gone, dead and buried. The progress of the human mind, the slow and resistless influence of the logic of common sense, the wholesome influence of the sciences of observation in correcting visionary metaphysics, have swept away aeons, emanations, dualism,[75] and the rest. But a subtler, and to modern minds infinitely more attractive, doketism is round us, and accepted, as far as words go, with a pa.s.sionate enthusiasm.

What is this doketism?

Let us refer to the history and to the language of a mind of singular subtlety and power.

In George Eliot's early career she was induced to prepare for the press a translation of Strauss's mythical explanation of _the Life of Jesus_. It is no disrespect to so great a memory to say, that at that period of her career, at least, Miss Evans must have been unequal to grapple with such a work, if she desired to do so from a Christian point of view. She had not apparently studied the history or the structure of the Gospels. What she knew of their meaning she had imbibed from an antiquated and unscientific school of theologians. The faith of a sciolist engaged in a struggle for its life with the fatal strength of a critical giant instructed in the negative lore of all ages, and sharpened by hatred of the Christian religion, met with the result which was to be expected. Her faith expired, not without some painful throes. She fell a victim to the fallacy of youthful conceit--I cannot answer this or that objection, _therefore_ it is unanswerable. She wrote at first that she was "Strauss-sick." It made her ill to dissect the beautiful story of the crucifixion. She took to herself a consolation singular in the circ.u.mstances. The sight of an ivory crucifix, and of a pathetic picture of the Pa.s.sion, made her capable of enduring the first shock of the loss which her heart had sustained. That is, she found comfort in looking at tangible reminders of a scene which had ceased to be an historical reality, of a sufferer who had faded from a living Redeemer into the spectre of a visionary past. After a time, however, she feels able to propose to herself and others "a new starting point. We can never have a satisfactory basis for the history of the man Jesus, but that negation does not affect the Idea of the Christ, either in its historical influence, or its great symbolic meanings."[76] Yes! a Christ who has no history, of whom we do not possess one undoubted word, of whom we know, and can know, nothing; who has no flesh of fact, no blood of life; an idea, not a man; this is the Christ of modern doketism. The method of this widely diffused school is to separate the _sentiments_ of admiration which the history inspires from the _history_ itself; to sever the _ideas_ of the faith from the _facts_ of the faith, and then to present the _ideas_ thus surviving the dissolvents of criticism, as at once the refutation of the facts and the subst.i.tute for them.

This may be pretty writing, though false and illogical writing is rarely even _that_; but a little consideration will show that this new starting point is not even a plausible subst.i.tute for the old belief.

(1) We question simple believers in the first instance. We ask them what is the great religious power in Christianity for themselves, and for others like-minded? What makes people pure, good, self-denying, nurses of the sick, missionaries to the heathen? They will tell us that the power lies, not in any doketic idea of a Christ-life which was never lived, but in "the conviction that that idea was really and perfectly incarnated in an actual career,"[77] of which we have a record literally and absolutely true in all essential particulars.

When we turn to the past of the Church, we find that as it is with these persons, so it has ever been with the saints. For instance, we hear St. Paul speaking of his whole life. He tells us that "whether we went out of ourselves it was unto G.o.d, or whether we be sober, it is for you;" that is to say, such a life has two aspects, one G.o.d-ward, one man-ward. Its G.o.d-ward aspect is a n.o.ble insanity, its man-ward aspect a n.o.ble sanity; the first with its beautiful enthusiasm, the second with its saving common sense. What is the source of this?

"_For_ the love of Christ constraineth us,"--forces the whole stream of life to flow between these two banks without the deviations of selfishness--"because we thus judge, that He died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but to Him who for their sakes died and rose again."[78] It was the real unselfish life of a real unselfish Man which made such a life as that of St. Paul a possibility. Or we may think of the first beginning of St. John's love for our Lord. When he turned to the past, he remembered one bright day about ten in the morning, when the real Jesus turned to him and to another with a real look, and said with a human voice, "what seek ye?"

and then--"come, and ye shall see."[79] It was the real living love that won the only kind of love which could enable the old man to write as he did in this Epistle so many years afterwards--"we love because He first loved us."[80]

(2) We address ourselves next to those who look at Christ simply as an ideal. We venture to put to them a definite question. You believe that there is no solid basis for the history of the man Jesus; that His life as an historical reality is lost in a dazzling mist of legend and adoration. Has the idea of a Christ, divorced from all accompaniment of authentic fact, unfixed in a definite historical form, uncontinued in an abiding existence, been operative or inoperative for yourselves? Has it been a practical power and motive, or an occasional and evanescent sentiment? There can be no doubt about the answer. It is not a make-belief but a belief which gives purity and power. It is not an ideal of Jesus but the blood of Jesus which cleanseth us from all sin.

There are other lessons of abiding practical importance to be drawn from the polemical elements in St. John's Epistle. These, however, we can only briefly indicate because we wish to leave an undivided impression of that which seems to be St. John's chief object _controversially_. There were Gnostics in Asia Minor for whom the mere _knowledge_ of certain supposed spiritual truths was all in all, as there are those amongst ourselves who care for little but what are called clear views. For such St. John writes--"and hereby we do _know_ that we _know_ Him, if we keep His commandments."[81] There were heretics in and about Ephesus who conceived that the special favour of G.o.d, or the illumination which they obtained by junction with the sect to which they had "gone out" from the Church, neutralised the poison of sin, and made innocuous for _them_ that which might have been deadly for others. They suffered, as they thought, no more contamination by it, than "gold by lying upon the dunghill" (to use a favourite metaphor of their own). St. John utters a principle which cleaves through every fallacy in every age, which says or insinuates that sin subjective can in any case cease to be sin objective.

"Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law, for sin is the transgression of the law. All unrighteousness is sin."[82] Possibly within the Church itself, certainly among the sectarians without it, there was a disposition to lessen the glory of the Incarnation, by looking upon the Atonement as narrow and partial in its aim. St.

John's unhesitating statement is that "He is the propitiation for the whole world." Thus does the eagle of the Church ever fix his gaze above the clouds of error, upon the Sun of universal truth.

Above all, over and through his negation of temporary and local errors about the person of Christ, St. John leads the Church in all ages to the true Christ. Cerinthus, in a form which seems to us eccentric and revolting, proclaimed a Jesus not born of a virgin, temporarily endowed with the sovereign power of the Christ, deprived of Him before his pa.s.sion and resurrection, while the Christ remained spiritual and impa.s.sible. He taught a _commonplace_ Jesus. At the beginning of his Epistle and Gospel, John "wings his soul, and leads his readers onward and upward." He is like a man who stands upon the sh.o.r.e and looks upon town and coast and bay. Then another takes the man off with him far to sea. All that he surveyed before is now lost to him; and as he gazes ever oceanward, he does not stay his eye upon any intervening object, but lets it range over the infinite azure. So the Apostle leads us above all creation, and transports us to the ages before it; makes us raise our eyes, not suffering us to find any end in the stretch above, since end is none.[83] That "in the beginning,"

"from the beginning," of the Epistle and Gospel, includes nothing short of the eternal G.o.d. The doketics of many shades proclaimed an ideological, a misty Christ. "Every spirit which confesseth Jesus Christ as in flesh having come is of G.o.d, and every spirit which confesseth not Jesus, is not of G.o.d." "Many deceivers have gone out into the world, they who confess not Jesus Christ coming in flesh."[84] Such a Christ of mist as these words warn us against is again shaped by more powerful intellects and touched with tenderer lights. But the shadowy Christ of George Eliot and of Mill is equally arraigned by the hand of St. John. Each believer may well think within himself--I must die, and that, it may be, very soon; I must be alone with G.o.d, and my own soul; with that which I am, and have been; with my memories, and with my sins. In that hour the weird desolate language of the Psalmist will find its realisation: "lover and friend hast thou put from me, and mine acquaintance are--_darkness_."[85]

Then we want, and then we may find, a real Saviour. Then we shall know that if we have only a doketic Christ, we shall indeed be alone--for "except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you."[86]

NOTE.

The two following extracts, in addition to what has been already said in this discourse, will supply the reader with that which it is most necessary for him to know upon the heresies of Asia Minor. 1. "Two princ.i.p.al heresies upon the nature of Christ then prevailed, each diametrically opposite to the other, as well as to the Catholic faith.

One was the heresy of the Doketae, which destroyed the verity of the _Human Nature_ in Christ; the other was the heresy of the Ebionites, who denied the _Divine Nature_, and the eternal Generation, and inclined to press the observation of the ceremonial law. Ancient writers allow these as heresies of the first century; all admit that they were powerful in the age of Ignatius. Hence Theodoret (_Prom._) divided the books of these heresies into two categories. In the first he included those who put forward the idea of a second Creator, and a.s.serted that the Lord had appeared illusively. In the second he placed those who maintained that the Lord was merely a man. Of the first, Jerome observed (_Adv. Lucifer._ xxiii.) 'that while the Apostles yet remained upon the earth, while the blood of Christ was almost smoking upon the sod of Judaea, some a.s.serted that the body of the Lord was a phantom.' Of the second, the same writer remarked that 'St. John, at the invitation of the bishops of Asia Minor, wrote his Gospel against Cerinthus and other heretics--and especially against the dogma of the Ebionites then rising into existence, who a.s.serted that Christ did not exist before Mary.' Epiphanius notes that these heresies were mainly of Asia Minor (f?? de e? t?' ?s?a). _Haeres._ lvi." (Pearson, _Vindic. Ignat._, ii., c. i., p. 351.)

2. "Two of these sects or schools are very ancient, and seem to have been referred to by St. John. The first is that of the Naa.s.senians or Ophites. The antiquity of this sect is guaranteed to us by the author of the _Philosophumena_, who represents them as the real founders of Gnosticism. "Later," he says, "they were called _Gnostics_, pretending that they only _knew the depths_." (To this allusion is made Apoc. ii.

24, which would identify these sectaries with the Balaamites and Nicolaitans.) The second of these great heresies of Asia Minor is the doketic. The publication of the _Philosophumena_ has furnished us with much more precise information about their tenets. We need not say much about the divine emanation--the fall of souls into matter, their corporeal captivity, their final rehabilitation (these are merely the ordinary Gnostic ideas). But we may follow what they a.s.sert about the Saviour and His manifestation in the world. They admit in Him the only Son of the Father (? ????e??? pa?? a???e? a??????), who descended to the reign of shadows and the Virgin's womb, where He clothed Himself in a gross, human material body. But this was a vestment of no integrally personal and permanent character; it was, indeed, a sort of masquerade, an artifice or fiction imagined to deceive the prince of this world. The Saviour at His baptism received a second birth, and clad Himself with a subtler texture of body, formed in the bosom of the waters--if that can be termed a body which was but a fantastic texture woven or framed upon the model of His earthly body. During the hours of the Pa.s.sion, the flesh formed in Mary's womb, and it alone, was nailed to the tree. The great Archon or Demiurgus, whose work that flesh was, was played upon and deceived, in pouring His wrath only upon the work of His hands. For the soul, or spiritual substance, which had been wounded in the flesh of the Saviour, extricated itself from this as from an unmeet and hateful vesture; and itself contributing to nailing it to the cross, triumphed by that very flesh over princ.i.p.alities and powers. It did not, however, remain naked, but clad in the subtler form which it had a.s.sumed in its baptismal second birth (_Philosoph._, viii. 10). What is remarkable in this theory is, first, the admission of the reality of the terrestrial body, formed in the Virgin's womb, and then nailed to the cross. The _negation_ is only of the _real_ and permanent union of this body with the heavenly spirit which inhabits it. We shall, further, note the importance which it attaches to the Saviour's baptism, and the part played by water, as if an intermediate element between flesh and spirit. This may bear upon 1 John v. 8."

[This pa.s.sage is from a _Dissertation--les Trois Temoins Celestes_, in a collection of religious and literary papers by French scholars (Tom.

ii., Sept. 1868, pp. 388-392). The author, since deceased, was the Abbe Le Hir, M. Renan's instructor in Hebrew at Saint Sulpice, and p.r.o.nounced by his pupil one of the first of European Hebraists and scientific theologians.]

FOOTNOTES:

[69] "Proprium est credentis ut c.u.m a.s.sensu cogitet." "The intellect of him who believes a.s.sents to the thing believed, not because he sees that thing either in itself or by logical reference to first self-evident principles; but because it is so far convinced by Divine authority as to a.s.sent to things which it does not see, and on account of the dominance of the will in setting the intellect in motion." This sentence is taken from a pa.s.sage of Aquinas which appears to be of great and permanent value. _Summa Theolog._ 2^a, 2^ae quaest. i. art. 4.

quaest. v. art. 2.

[70] Acts xx. 30.

[71] ta? e????? ?e??f???a?, ?a? a?t??ese?? t?? ?e?d????? ???se??. 1 Tim. vi. 20. The "ant.i.theses" may either touch with slight sarcasm upon pompous pretensions to scientific logical method; or may denote the really self-contradictory character of these elaborate compositions; or again, their polemical opposition to the Christian creed.

[72] ????? ?a? ?e?ea????a?? ape?a?t???. 1 Tim. i. 3, 4.

[73] Irenaeus quotes 1 Tim. i. 4, and interprets it of the Gnostic 'aeons.' _Adv. Haeres._, i. Prom.

[74] Few phenomena of criticism are more unaccountable than the desire to evade any acknowledgment of the historical existence of these singular heresies. Not long after St. John's death, Polycarp, in writing to the Philippians, quotes 1 John iv. 3, and proceeds to show that doketism had consummated its work down to the last fibres of the root of the creed, by two negations--no resurrection of the body, no judgment. (Polycarp, _Epist. ad Philip._, vii.) Ignatius twice deals with the Doketae at length. To the Trallians he delivers what may be called an antidoketic creed, concluding in the tone of one who was wounded by what he was daily hearing. "Be deaf then when any man speaks unto you without Jesus Christ, who is of Mary, who truly was born, truly suffered under Pontius Pilate, truly was crucified and died, truly also was raised from the dead. But if some who are unbelieving say that He suffered apparently, _as if in vision, being visionary themselves_, why am I a prisoner? why do I choose to fight with wild beasts?" (Ignat., _Ep. ad Trall._, iv. x.) The play upon the name doketae cannot be mistaken (?e???s?? t? d??e?? pep???e?a? a?t??, a?t?? ??te? t? d??e??). Ignatius writes to another Church--"What profited it me if one praiseth me but blasphemeth my Lord, not confessing that He bears true human flesh. They abstain from Eucharist and prayer, because they confess not that the Eucharist is flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ." (_Ep. ad Smyrn._, v. vi. vii.)

[75] The elder Mr. Mill, however, appears to have seriously leaned to this as a conceivable solution of the contradictory phenomena of existence.

[76] _Life_ vol. ii., 359, 360.

[77] Much use has here been made of a truly remarkable article in the _Spectator_, Jan. 31st, 1885.

[78] 2 Cor. v. 13-15.

[79] John i. 43.

[80] 1 John iv. 19.

[81] 1 John ii. 3.

[82] 1 John iii. 4, v. 17.

[83] Every one who reads Greek should refer to the magnificent pa.s.sage, _S. Joann. Chrysos., in Joann., Homil._ ii. 4.

[84] 1 John iv. 2; 2 John v. 7. See notes on the pa.s.sages.

[85] Psalm lviii. 18.

[86] John vi. 53.

DISCOURSE IV.

_THE IMAGE OF ST. JOHN'S SOUL IN HIS EPISTLE._

"He that loveth pureness of heart, for the grace of his lips the king shall be his friend."--PROV. xxii. 11.

? ?ee????.... ? de?te??? sapfe????.--APOC. xxi. 19.

"We know that whosoever is born of G.o.d sinneth not; but he that is begotten of G.o.d keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not. And we know that we are of G.o.d, and the whole world lieth in wickedness. And we know that the Son of G.o.d is come, and hath given us an understanding that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true G.o.d and eternal life."--1 JOHN v. 18-20.

Much has been said in the last few years of a series of subtle and delicate experiments in sound. Means have been devised of doing for the ear something a.n.a.logous to that which gla.s.ses do for another sense, and of making the results palpable by a system of notation. We are told that every tree for instance, according to its foliage, its position, and the direction of the winds, has its own prevalent note or tone, which can be marked down, and its _timbre_ made first visible by this notation, and then audible. So is it with the souls of the saints of G.o.d, and chiefly of the Apostles. Each has its own note, the prevalent key on which its peculiar music is set. Or we may employ another image which possibly has St. John's own authority. Each of the twelve has his peculiar emblem among the twelve vast and precious foundation stones which underlie the whole wall of the Church. St.

John may thus differ from St. Peter, as the sapphire's azure differs from the jasper's strength and radiance. Each is beautiful, but with its own characteristic tint of beauty.[87]